CHAPTER 29
10 years AC
Thetford, Norfolk
It was far easier to replace Helen’s bicycle than bother to fix the puncture. It went flat with an explosive pfffft just outside Thetford. Half a mile further along the road they rolled past a turning that promised them yet another retail park. Five minutes later the wheels of their bikes and the trailer rolled across a broad leaf-strewn parking forecourt. Untamed weeds pushed up in places, and the tarmac was lumpy where the roots of a row of decorative saplings were making a show of their spread down one side.
Like every other parking area they’d encountered, this one was more or less bereft of cars. Jacob remembered seeing roads clogged with vehicles in the week after the crash. It had seemed any car or van with at least a quarter of a tank of petrol had been pressed into service, packed with families desperately trying to get away from the chaotic anarchy of London.
But every artery out of the city had been sealed with a roadblock manned either by armed police and soldiers or ‘emergency response workers’ - civilians hastily pressed into service, armed and invariably supervised by a solitary policeman. They’d quickly discovered the civilian workers were a greater hazard, using the roadblocks as an opportunity to stop and shake down people for water and food supplies. Every major road and motorway out of London was now a graveyard of cars, vans and trucks - a carpet of immobile metal rooftops, bubbling and blistering from the rust spreading beneath their paintwork. The frames of their windscreens dotted green with small islands of moss, anchored to the perishing rubber seals.
The retail park looked like the dozen others they’d passed by in the last couple of days; even damaged to the same degree, as if a tacit agreement had passed amongst the panicking people of Britain that IKEA, Mothercare, Pets World, B&Q and the ubiquitous McDonald’s were to be ruthlessly targeted and plundered, and the likes of Currys, Carpetright and PC World were to be left well alone.
Leona told Jacob and Nathan to watch the trailer whilst she took the gun and led Helen inside Halfords to find a new bike for the girl.
Jacob watched them disappear into the dark interior then glanced back at the glass front of PC World. It looked utterly untouched. Not a single panel of glass broken, not even cracked. No lights on inside, of course. But, by the muted vanilla glow of late afternoon, he could just as well be in the past again; a Sunday morning before ten a.m. opening time, waiting for the first member of staff to turn up, yawning, nursing a hangover and unlocking the double doors for the first over-eager customer, impatient to get inside and replace an ink cartridge.
‘You see PC World?’ he said, pointing to it.
Nathan turned to look at the unbroken glass.
His eyebrows flickered up. ‘Hey, cool. Ain’t broken.’
Jacob realised that neither of them had seen an expanse of glass as large as this one still intact; not since before. Really quite an odd sight in a world where every window was a frame of snaggle-toothed shards, or snow-white granulated crystals.
Nathan bent down, fumbling for a lump of loose tarmac.
‘What’re you doing?’
He grinned. ‘Gonna smash it.’
‘What?’
‘It’s all ours, Jay. No one’s did it in all this time. So it’s, like, ours to smash.’ He prised loose a crumbling chunk of parking lot which he tossed from one hand to the other with gleeful anticipation. ‘Come on, Jay, we’ll smash it together, on three.’
‘No.’
‘One . . . two . . .’
‘I said NO,’ Jacob barked, stepping away from his bike and letting it clatter to the ground noisily.
‘. . . three—’
Jacob clumsily punched Nathan’s shoulder and the tarmac dropped from his hand and clattered noisily to the ground.
‘Hey! The f*ck you do that for?’
‘I don’t want to smash it. I mean, why? Why break it? It’s lasted this long.’
‘It’s a f*cking window, man! That’s all. Just a f*ckin’ window!’
Jacob’s face hardened. ‘It’s just . . .’
‘What? Just like it was before?’ Nathan looked at him. ‘Shit, Jay, what’s the matter with you?’
‘I just . . . I don’t know . . . it’s done so well to survive this far, you know? It just seems wrong.’
Nathan’s scowl vanished and his faced creased with a bemused grin. ‘Jesus, man. It’s a piece of glass that didn’t get broke. That’s all it—’
He stopped and frowned.
Jacob turned to look towards the glass frontage they’d been discussing.
‘Someone in there.’
Jacob saw it too. Movement in the dark interior beyond. The faint flicker of torchlight and the pale shape of a yellow T-shirt moving between the shelves and stacks of boxed printers and PCs.
‘That one person you think?’ asked Nathan. ‘Or more?’
Jacob squinted. ‘Dunno.’
A moment later the flicker of torchlight snapped off and then they saw the T-shirt grow more distinct as it approached the front of the store with the late afternoon light streaming in through the glass front. The pale T-shirt seemed to be carrying something in its darker arms. As it squeezed through a checkout and emerged through an open door that, once upon a time, would have slid aside with a compliant whoosh, they saw the T-shirt was on a man with pallid skin and a scruffy mop of long ginger hair who was whistling to himself cheerfully.
He was outside and in the sun when he stopped in his tracks, studying them intently. The whistling ceased.
‘Leona!!’ shouted Jacob. ‘There’s somebody out here!!’
‘Hey!’ barked Nathan. ‘All right?’ he said, taking several steps forwards.
The man in the yellow T-shirt lowered the boxes to the ground carefully - boxes with ‘5.1 Bose Surround Sound System’ printed boldly on them. He reached up to his ears and pulled out a pair of small earphones, hissing music loudly in the stillness. His eyes warily appraised Nathan.
‘Uh . . . look, I don’t have any food,’ he said, licking his lips nervously and shifting from one foot to the other. ‘Honest, bro, I’ve got nothing you want. No food or water. I just—’
‘Hey, don’t worry,’ said Jacob stepping forward to stand beside Nathan. ‘It’s all right, we’re not going to rob you or anything.’
The man’s eyes were drawn to movement from the Halfords’ entrance.
‘Who’s there?’ came Leona’s voice across the car-park, echoing off the storefront like a gunshot.
‘A man!!’ Jacob yelled over his shoulder. He turned back to him. ‘Are there other people with you?’
The man’s face flickered anxiously. He looked relatively young, perhaps Leona’s age; on his pallid face the meagre tufts of a trimmed ginger goatee. He pulled a Jesus-long cord of lank, greasy hair out of his eyes and tucked it behind one ear.
‘No . . . uh . . . it’s just me.’
Jacob offered him a friendly smile. ‘Well that’s all right then.’
The man watched Leona and Helen approach, his eyes on the gun she was holding.
‘Hey! No need to shoot me. Look, I’m leaving!’
Jacob shook his head. ‘Don’t worry. It’s okay.’
‘You want this stuff? Fine, take it. There’s loads more inside—’
Nathan shook his head. ‘Relax, man.’
‘Or jack my truck?’
‘Shit. You got a workin’ truck?’ exclaimed Nathan.
He nodded, his eyes darting to a blue Ford Transit pick-up truck across the car-park.
‘I’ve got a little diesel,’ he replied cautiously, his eyes still on Leona; still on the gun in her hands. ‘Not a lot. Just enough that I can run into town every now and then.’
Leona stepped past Nathan, discreetly lowering the barrel of the gun so that it wasn’t levelled at the man any more.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Raymond.’
‘I’m Leona.’
She appraised him in much the same way she’d seen Mum silently judge newcomers. The man seemed well-fed and practically dressed with clothes either washed or recently pulled from a shop. He didn’t appear to be a shambling loner draped with tattered rags and a dangerously haunted look in his eyes. He looked like he might have come from a community better furnished than theirs, actually. She noticed his earphones hissing music and dangling around his knees, wires snaking up to an iPod poking out of a hip pocket.
‘How many of you?’ Leona asked finally.
Raymond shrugged. ‘Not many. Just me, actually.’
She pointed at his iPod. ‘You’ve got electricity, right? I used to have one of those . . . they don’t take batteries, you’ve got to recharge them.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, I’ve got a few things running at my place,’ he conceded warily.
‘But it’s just you?’ said Leona.
Raymond nodded. He studied them in silence for a while. ‘You’re all young. Just kids—’
‘I’m twenty-nine,’ she replied flatly. ‘What’s your point?’
‘Sorry. Thought you were younger,’ he replied. ‘It’s just that, occasionally, I come across groups of survivors. The younger groups, your age and younger, they’re more dangerous. Well, to be honest, almost like wild animals sometimes. I try to steer clear of them.’
‘We’re good ones,’ said Helen.
He nodded. ‘Okay.’
‘We’re headed south to London,’ said Leona. ‘Apparently they’re rebuilding things there. You heard anything about that?’
He shook his head. ‘Nope.’
Helen took a step forward, entranced by the hissing still coming from Raymond’s headphones. ‘Is that . . . like, proper music?’
He shrugged. ‘I got hip-hop, some garage, some rock . . . all sorts really. Just listening to a bit of Jay Dilla right now.’
Nathan cocked his head. ‘Shit, I remember! My mate’s brother had his stuff,’ he uttered, approving. ‘Dilla was well cool.’
‘Yeah. I cleaned out a record shop and ripped all their CDs onto my hard drive. I’ve got pretty much everything, more or less.’
‘Hard drive?’ said Nathan. ‘You got a computer?’
Raymond shrugged. ‘Yeah, several, actually.’
‘We have loads of spare food,’ blurted Helen, ‘could we come stay the night at your place?’
‘Helen!’ snapped Leona angrily.
The girl shut up, her face flushing crimson as Leona glared at her. She turned back to Raymond. He didn’t look the dangerous schizo type; he had a slight build, looked like the kind of guy you’d see working in a comic store, or turning up at some Star Trek geek-a-thon, dressed as a Klingon.
‘There’s just you?’
He nodded.
Leona considered Helen’s blurted suggestion quietly for a moment. ‘All right then. Could we stay the night? Just one night, if we, you know, shared our food?’
Raymond’s eyes darted from one to the other, warily returning to the gun dangling from her hands.
‘Sure . . . uh . . . sure you’re not going to rob me or something?’
‘Would it help if I promised you we won’t?’
He shrugged and wrinkled his nose. ‘Okay,’ he answered. ‘Why not?’